‘Our worst nightmare.” That’s how a “senior official” in the Obama administration, quoted by The Financial Times, describes the White House fear that not only might the Scots quit the United Kingdom but that Britain would then quit the European Union.

What a bizarre thing to say just now. We are racing to send 3,000 GIs to Africa to launch a war against Ebola, one of the deadliest viruses ever known. It could kill hundreds of thousands before it has run its course.

We’re also scrambling to launch a campaign to “degrade and destroy” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, which is threatening to bring its war to America. This, when the administration has lost control of our own southern border.

Meanwhile, Kremlin strongman Vladimir Putin is pressing a proxy war against Ukraine while plotting against the Baltic states. Plus Russia has been holding war games with the globe’s biggest communist country, China.

We don’t know yet what Scottish voters will decide (they’re voting Thursday). But in the relative sense it doesn’t matter all that much. The more important question is whether Britain will exit the European Union — what’s known across the pond as the Brexit.

The question isn’t definitely going to a referendum. But Prime Minister David Cameron has promised, under certain conditions, to hold a vote next spring. He is under pressure from Nigel Farage and his United Kingdom Independence Party.

Farage used to be a Conservative, but he quit the party in 1992, after its leader, Prime Minister John Major, inked the Maastricht Treaty. That’s the parchment that created the European Union, the whirlpool now sucking away Britain’s liberties and character.

Farage’s brilliant rebellion against Europe ought to have been predictable. Back in 1988, then-PM Margaret Thatcher went to Bruges, Belgium, to deliver one of her most famous speeches — a warning against the socialists in the European Commission.

“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels,” she proclaimed. That launched the battle now coming to a head.

After she left office, she set about writing the memoirs in which she records, among other things, her own nightmares in respect of Europe. She recalled mocking the British Labor Party for refusing to say where it stood. Would it defend the rights of Britain’s own parliament?

She wrote: “I was not at that point to know, and indeed I would not have wanted to imagine, that precisely the same would soon be said of the Conservative government led by my successor.” This is what is going to be coming to a head in the Brexit.

The nightmare Thatcher imagined would emerge by the end of the 21st century, one with half a dozen “great powers,” as she put it. She feared that their constant conniving would put us on the brink of a world war, as in 1914.

Thatcher preferred an Atlantic Alliance that was “in essence, America as the dominant power surrounded by allies which, in their own long-term interest, generally follow its lead.”

She wanted what she called a “superpower of last resort,” and she wanted it to be us.

Britain she saw as our ally. She didn’t want it to be drawn away into Europe and Europe to emerge as a competitor superpower. She always sought to persuade America to remain the dominant power. The idea of our pivot over to Asia would’ve horrified her.

The way to look at all this tumult in Britain and between Britain and Europe is as an opportunity for America to seize the lead in redeeming Thatcher’s vision.

Whether Scotland stays or goes, the right move is for Britain to quit Europe pronto and for America to bring in a president with a vision for genuine American leadership in the world.

Then start an alliance of countries committed to the principles of English and American (and, once upon a time, Scottish) liberty.

It is only from a redoubt of liberty that we’ll be able to confront the empire of terror that is on the march. That is the way to turn the Obama administration’s “worst nightmare” into the dream of free democracies.